Friday, March 28, 2014

I put this little hypothetical situation on Facebook the other day, and it has generated some lively discussion. If you haven't friended me on FB yet, feel free to do so!

Who does the American taxpayer more harm: 1) the guy from Mexico or Canada who is in the U.S. without a permission slip from Obama, who is working away mowing yards, hanging sheetrock, or pouring concrete for about $25,000 per year, and who is paying money into Social Security that he'll never be able to collect, OR, 2) the machinist or engineer at General Dynamics being paid $60,000 per year, directly by the taxpayers, to make aircraft we don't need?

(General Dynamics is a manufacturer of munitions and armaments for the military-industrial complex.)

Sunday, March 23, 2014

My employer purchased a percentage of a company up there. It's an 8 million dollar per year operation that somehow managed to lose 3 million dollars.

Yeah. 3 million.

How in the hell can that happen?

Well, here are the basic reasons....

1) The old owners were not present. "Everyone" was supposed to own the factory. Therefore, nobody owned it. The inmates were running the asylum.

2) There were no incentives to keep costs down. They were buying things from buddies and family. (And they're still trying to, which I will end about one hour after walking in the door.)

3) The place has a strong union mentality. One co-worker of mine went up there to help out for a few weeks, and he swears that they weren't going to ship $300,000.00 worth of products because they had run out of #8 machine screws. He drove down to Home Depot and bought some freakin' machine screws, and the orders shipped on time.

4) Everyone was getting raises like clockwork, profitability and performance be damned.

Those are the big reasons why the factory was losing money. We almost have the place sorted out, but there's still a lot of work to do.

Does that factory remind you of another organization? It should.

Here are the reasons government doesn't work.

1) Nobody owns the government. "Everyone" is supposed to own it. Therefore nobody owns it. The inmates get to run the asylum.

2) There are no incentives to keep costs down. Bureaucrats are actually incentivized to create bigger budgets and hire more and more people. Therefore, their pay scale goes up.

3) Government has the strongest union mentality in our nation. Examples abound.

4) Everyone working in government can probably tell you, plus or minus a few percentage points, how much they'll be earning five years from now, efficiency and performance be damned.